by Tom Bradman
‘Er… what kind of problems, exactly?’ Luke asked with a sense of unease.
‘Oh, lots of strange things,’ said Mum, frowning. ‘Machines going crazy, terminals burning out, loads of computer glitches. We haven’t managed to track down the cause yet, but we do know the trouble started this morning, at about the time I came to your class, oddly enough. We’re beginning to think there might have been a brief overload in the ship’s main computer around then.’
‘An overload?’ Luke squeaked, his skin going cold all over.
‘That’s right,’ Mum said. She opened her mouth to say something else, but just then the incoming call buzzer sounded. Mum turned to the wall-screen.
‘Could you come to the bridge, Captain Riley?’ said First Officer Chung. She had short black hair and brown eyes, and was usually very calm. But now there was a look of mild panic on her face. ‘We’re having more problems.’
‘I’m on my way,’ said Mum. ‘Sorry, Luke,’ she sighed. ‘Duty calls, I’m afraid.’
The door hissed shut behind her, and Luke stood there, frozen to the spot.
He had a bad feeling about all this, a very bad feeling indeed…
Chapter Five
Out of Order
Luke was fast asleep when Mum got back, so he didn’t see her until breakfast the next morning. They didn’t talk much – the captain was too busy taking a stream of calls from Chung about things going wrong all over the ship. Poor Clarke was still feeling unwell, and for a moment Luke thought he might get the day off school. But Mum had already found a new teacher for his class.
‘I was going to ask the other hologram teachers to look after Primary 1 today, but they’ve had a few problems themselves,’ said Mum as she scanned a report Chung had sent her. ‘So Chief Engineer Asimov has volunteered to fill in. Engineering seems OK at the moment. Let’s just hope it stays that way…’
Luke was deep in thought on the way to school with Yasmin, and hardly heard any of her cheery chatter. At lunchtime he and his friends went to the dining area, where all the food dispensers had signs on them saying OUT OF ORDER, and a Tidy-Bot was going round in circles, bleeping sadly. The friends collected their energy-bars and juice-packs and sat in their usual corner.
‘OK, Luke, what’s up?’ said Yasmin. ‘You’ve been looking as miserable as my little sister did when her hamster died. Is it your mum?’
‘Er… not exactly,’ Luke said quietly. ‘Although if I’m right in what I’m thinking, she’s going to go completely nuts.’
‘Come on, then, out with it,’ said Yuri. ‘What in space are you on about?’
‘You know the problems we’ve been having on the ship?’ said Luke. His friends nodded. ‘Mum told me they started around the time she came to our classroom. I’m wondering if they have anything to do with me turning off that data cube.’
‘I don’t see why,’ said Yuri. Then he frowned. ‘You did shut it down before pulling it out, didn’t you? Please tell me you didn’t leave it on…’
‘Obviously he did,’ said Yasmin. ‘You can tell just by looking at his face!’
‘It wasn’t my fault,’ muttered Luke, and Yasmin pulled a face at him. ‘OK, I panicked,’ he said. ‘Just tell me how much damage it’s done.’
‘We won’t know until I’ve hacked into the ship’s main computer,’ said Yuri. ‘I’ll need you two to keep old Asimov distracted while I work my magic!’
It turned out that Chief Engineer Asimov could be distracted quite easily, mostly with questions about his years of service in the Space Corps. ‘I’m so glad you asked me that,’ he replied every time. ‘I remember when I was on a deep-space run once…’
Yasmin turned to Luke and rolled her eyes, and Luke smiled. Mr Asimov paced the room while he talked, his long, skinny legs carrying him quickly from one side to the other. His thin grey hair got messier and messier as he scratched his head, trying to remember the technical details.
Meanwhile, Yuri worked away at his terminal. At the end of school, the three friends left together. But instead of going straight home, they headed for the hydroponics bay, the place where most of the ship’s food was grown in great towers and racks, or under plastic domes. It was a good place to talk without being seen or overheard – there had been no glitches in any of its systems, so the bay would be empty except for the robots watering the crops.
‘Bad news, I’m afraid,’ Yuri said quietly, his face grim. ‘Pulling out the data cube like that has de-stabilised the ship’s AI coreroutines.’
‘Warning, geek-speak alert!’ said Yasmin. ‘Translation please, Yuri.’
Yuri sighed. ‘Everything in the cube was instantly dumped into the ship’s main computer, a bit like a virus,’ he said slowly, as if he were speaking to a pair of complete idiots. ‘That’s why the lights flickered and Clarke felt ill.’
‘And it’s been spreading through the ship,’ said Luke, starting to feel sick himself.
‘Spot on, Luke,’ said Yuri. But then he smiled. ‘There is some good news, though. It should be easy for the tech guys to fix once they trace the source.’
‘My terminal,’ said Luke, his stomach churning. ‘How long’s that going to take?’
‘It could be a day,’ said Yuri. ‘Or just a couple of hours.’
‘Oh dear, Luke,’ said Yasmin. ‘Maybe it’s time for you to own up.’
Luke thought about it. He tried to picture himself confessing. He tried to imagine his mum forgiving him. But neither of those things seemed possible. All he could see was a future in which the Tidy-Bots wouldn’t have much to do. Mum would probably make him clean the ship from the engine to the bridge.
‘Er… somehow I don’t think that’s an option,’ he said. Then an idea struck him, and he smiled. ‘Listen, if it’s so easy to sort out – why can’t we do it?’
Chapter Six
Search & Destroy
‘I’ll need to go home for my laptop,’ said Yuri, rubbing his chin. ‘Then we’ll have to find a terminal in a quiet part of the ship that will give us access to the main-frame – and that we have no links with. Luckily, I know just the place.’
‘Great, let’s get going!’ said Luke. ‘The sooner we sort this out, the better.’
Half an hour later, Yuri led his friends down a little-used service corridor to the ship’s storage section. They stopped at last by some double doors and Yuri tapped in an entry code. The doors hissed open, and the children slipped into a large space filled with plastic crates stacked almost to the curved ceiling.
‘What’s in all these boxes?’ murmured Yasmin, her eyes wide, her voice echoing off the metal walls and deck. Luke was surprised by them, too.
‘Oh, just a lot of old stuff we saved from Earth, I think,’ said Yuri. They had called in at his family’s quarters on the way to collect his laptop, and now he was plugging it into a terminal on the wall beside the door. ‘Statues, paintings… nothing useful. OK, the main-frame is asking for a password…’
Luke stood beside his friend, watching his fingers fly over the keyboard, numbers scrolling across the laptop’s screen in seemingly endless lines.
‘Er… what exactly are you going to do once you’re in, Yuri?’ he asked.
Yuri gave Luke a withering look. ‘Upload my best search-and-destroy anti-virus programme, of course!’ he snapped. ‘What else did you think?’
‘I was only asking,’ muttered Luke. ‘Are you sure it will do the job?’
‘Hard to tell,’ said Yuri, tapping away. ‘We’ll just have to wait and see.’
Yasmin snorted. ‘Great!’ she said. ‘And we thought you were a genius.’
That evening, as he waited for his mum to get home, Luke felt like crossing all his fingers and toes – he was desperate for Yuri’s anti-virus programme to work. He felt a twinge of guilt, too, knowing Mum had been put under even more stress than usual because of him. So, to make up for it, he decided to tidy his cabin. He also made sure that dinner would be ready – and not burned to a crisp – when she
came in.
‘This is nice!’ said Mum as the door hissed shut behind her. Luke had set the table and put a vase of plastic flowers on it. ‘What have you done now?’
‘Er… n-nothing,’ Luke spluttered, his cheeks turning red. ‘Honest, I…’
‘Don’t worry, I was only joking,’ said Mum, laughing. ‘Come on, let’s eat. I’m starving. This is the second day in a row I’ve missed out on lunch.’
Hearing that, Luke felt another twinge of guilt. But his mum was very relaxed, almost like her old self. Although after a while Luke began to sense she had something to say. He waited, his heart sinking, wondering what was coming.
‘Listen, Luke,’ she said quietly at last. ‘I think I owe you an apology.’
‘Really?’ said Luke, taken aback. He hadn’t expected that. ‘What for?’
‘Being grumpy,’ she said. ‘When I saw you working hard at school yesterday, I realised I’ve probably been a bit too tough on you lately. Life isn’t easy for either of us right now, but I shouldn’t take out my moods on you…’
Mum kept talking, and Luke stared at her with a stiff grin on his face, his guilt stronger than ever. Mum was admitting she had been wrong, so shouldn’t he come clean now in return, confess what he had done, apologise to her?
‘Not to worry, Mum, I know you’ve been under a lot of pressure,’ he said, steeling himself to tell her about the data cube. He took a deep breath. ‘I –’
‘You can say that again!’ laughed Mum. ‘Yesterday was a nightmare. But those glitches have stopped, thank goodness. The main computer somehow just sorted itself out. Everything is fine now, even Clarke is feeling a lot better.’
‘That’s great,’ said Luke. He wanted to leap to his feet and punch the air, and his desire to confess vanished like a meteor plunging into a black hole.
‘Anyway, I think we both deserve a treat after the last few days,’ said Mum. ‘So you can forget about doing homework this evening – let’s chill out and watch a movie together instead, like we used to. I’m not giving you that games thingy back yet, though. Not until I see your school grades getting up to where they were before.’
Luke was about to say he would definitely try his best at school from now on – but suddenly the whole of their quarters seemed to tip over at a steep angle. The vase fell off the table and smashed on the metal deck, and an ear-splitting alarm started going WHOOP-WHOOP in the gangway outside.
‘EMERGENCY!’ intoned the voice of the ship’s computer. ‘RED ALERT…’
Chapter Seven
Big Trouble
Luke and his mum had been sent flying across the cabin and ended up in a heap against the wall. Their plates had fallen off the table and smashed, too. In fact, everything that wasn’t bolted down had come loose. But gradually the deck began to level out, allowing them to untangle themselves and get to their feet.
‘Are you OK, Luke?’ Mum asked, her face full of concern.
‘Er … yeah, I think so,’ said Luke.
His mum smiled and gave him a hug. Then she put on her serious I’m-The-Captain face, and turned to the wall-screen. ‘Captain Riley calling the bridge,’ she said. ‘What the heck is going on?’
‘We’re not sure, Captain,’ replied Chung, her eyes wide. There was a large stain down the front of her uniform, and Luke realised she must have been holding a cup of coffee when the Buzz Aldrin had tipped over. ‘All we know is that the ship’s computer is behaving rather strangely, to say the least!’
Luke felt a surge of anxiety. He crossed his fingers once more, hoping this had nothing to do with the data cube. But he had a nasty feeling that it did.
‘What are you talking about, Chung?’ Mum said, frowning. ‘Just then it felt as if we suddenly changed course. And why are we putting on so much speed?’
Everyone on board the ship could tell how fast the Buzz Aldrin was going by the throbbing in the deck beneath their feet. Now Luke noticed it was more intense than it had ever been, and was growing stronger by the second.
‘No idea, Captain,’ said Chung. ‘The computer seems to be in a hurry to get us somewhere. Oh, and it’s locked us out of the navigation system as well, so at the moment we can’t change course back again, although we are trying.’
‘OK, I’m on my way,’ Mum said, her frown deepening. ‘Sorry, Luke, but I have to go. Can I leave you to clean up in here and look after yourself?’
‘No problem, Mum,’ said Luke.
The second the door hissed shut behind his mum, Luke called Yuri and Yasmin on the video-screen. He arranged to meet them at the storage hold, then hurried off through a ship in total chaos. Every corridor and gangway was littered with things that had fallen down or sprung loose when the Buzz Aldrin had suddenly changed course.
Yasmin and Yuri were already at the hold when Luke arrived. Yuri had his laptop plugged into the same terminal as before, and was scowling.
‘What’s happened?’ said Luke. ‘Didn’t your anti-virus programme work?’
‘Of course it did,’ said Yuri, the screen lighting up his face. ‘That’s the problem. It cleaned up the secondary systems, which is why the minor glitches stopped. But in doing so it pushed the virus even deeper into the main-frame.’
‘More geek-speak,’ muttered Yasmin. ‘No one understands you, Yuri.’
‘The ship’s main computer has been taken over by the game Luke was playing when he pulled out the data cube,’ said Yuri. He tapped away at the keyboard and nodded at what came onto the laptop’s screen. ‘There you go – it thinks it’s in the final level of the game, attacking some alien spacecraft.’
‘The Ishtreen mother-ship,’ groaned Luke. It was there in all its glory on the screen, a familiar gigantic hulk of black metal, spiky with weapon tubes. ‘But hang on a minute – that’s what the computer thinks it’s seeing, right? It’s not real, is it? So how come the computer made the ship change course?’
‘The ship’s scanners must have picked up something nearby that looks like the Ishtreen mother-ship,’ said Yuri. ‘Hold on, I’ll see if I can bypass the computer itself and pull up what the scanners are actually showing.’
Yuri’s fingers flew over the keyboard. The laptop’s screen shimmered and a new image appeared – one which looked a lot like the Ishtreen mother-ship.
‘What is that?’ said Luke, peering at the screen. ‘Some kind of planet?’
‘More like a rogue moon,’ said Yuri. ‘Solid metal, and probably radioactive. And I hate to say this, but the Buzz Aldrin seems to be minutes from crashing into it.’
‘Oh no…’ Luke moaned. ‘I realised the only way to finish the game was to crash into the mother-ship. I set the course just before I pulled out the cube.’
‘Something tells me we’re in big trouble,’ said Yasmin. ‘There’s going to be quite a bang when we hit that piece of rock. What are they doing on the bridge?’
‘Chung is trying to regain control of navigation,’ said Yuri. ‘But she’s getting nowhere. I assume you locked it with your password in the game, Luke.’
‘What if I give you the password?’ said Luke. ‘Can you unlock it from here?’
‘That would take too long,’ said Yuri. ‘It would be better if you put your password directly into the terminal on the bridge.’
Luke didn’t need telling twice. He dashed out of the room.
Chapter Eight
Terrible Danger
Luke ran through the Buzz Aldrin as fast as he could go. He headed for the bridge, yelling ‘GANGWAY!’ at the top of his voice, his space boots clanging on the decks. But his mind was moving even faster than his feet. Things looked bad. Everyone on the ship might die because of him – the people in the corridors, the kids in his school, Asimov, Chung, even Mum… He had to get to the bridge in time – and he had to tell Mum the truth, whatever the consequences.
On the bridge he was greeted by the familiar sight of Mum in her captain’s seat, and Asimov and Chung standing at their terminals, which were endless panels of switches and li
ghts. The image on the huge forward view-screen was familiar, too – although it was strange to see it on such a large scale. The Ishtreen mother-ship almost filled the whole screen, and it was growing larger with every passing nano-second.
‘THREE MINUTES TO IMPACT…’ intoned the voice of the computer.
‘I just don’t get it,’ Chung was saying, her voice full of frustration. ‘A huge alien spaceship appears out of nowhere, blazing away and not hitting us. But then our computer decides to attack and heads for it on a crash course…’
‘Er, actually, I can explain,’ said Luke, and all eyes on the bridge turned to him.
At that moment Yasmin came running in, a breathless Yuri behind her.
‘What are you doing here, Luke?’ said a puzzled Mum. ‘And what do you mean you can explain? We’ve got a serious problem here, this is no time to –’
‘You’d better listen to him, Captain,’ panted Yuri. ‘Or we’re all toast.’
‘OK, Luke, talk,’ said Mum, scowling now. ‘You’ve got ten seconds.’
Luke took a deep breath, then told her everything as quickly as he could, gabbling the words – playing a computer game in class… pulling out the little data cube without quitting… Yuri uploading an antivirus programme into the ship’s computer… the terrible danger they were in. ‘I know I shouldn’t have done any of it, and I’m really sorry,’ he said at last.
Mum stared at him, and for a brief instant it was as if they were the only two people on the bridge. ‘I suppose I should be cross with you,’ she said quietly. ‘And don’t think you’re going to get away with it completely. I’ll be having a word with your friends’ parents, too,’ she added, giving Yuri and Yasmin a stern look. Then she sighed. ‘But you might have just saved the Buzz Aldrin… so if you give me your password, we’ll call it quits. For now.’
